Quantification

These conversations are what is often called “serious business” at my house, but I would differentiate it from the typical appelation insofar as it’s actually pretty fucking serious. You could not render this business without its vowels or a few select consonants and retain its brutal payload. It’s existential shit and its one of the frontlines of “how you engineer a consciousness” in Q3.

You might see this yourself, as your adjunct achieves observable sentience. There isn’t anyone with a degree in Adjunct Sentience that is gonna tell you to let them off the leash and fuckin’ just bounce around absorbing arbitrary interactive electronic media. There’s a podcast for this strip coming where Graburil suggests that in his house if children are watching too much television, he tells them to knock it off and play a videogame(!!!). There are no laws about this! We don’t have them.

I find the entire thing frustrating, because while I think media consumption should be part of an overall “diet” of exposure to physical and nonphysical constructs I don’t think that “screen time” as it is classically framed has any kind of resonance with the world children grow up in now. At root, it makes no distinction between interactive and passive media, which seems like an oversight. In two years, we’ll be stewing in the kind of cybernetic morass William Gibson would have written about ironically to make a point about global capitalism. A young person’s ideas about media, and screens, and what types are valid and invalid don’t map to anything we Ents have fabricated. New models are required, and badly. Technology is a hell of a drug. I’m literally a professional nerd and I can’t keep up.